Production orders in Dynamics NAV allows you to consume both less and more than what’s defined on the components and to output both less and more than what’s defined on the operations in the routing. There is no check when you post, which is nice (sometime I which it was like that on sales and purchase orders as well, but that’s a topic for another post). But when you post more than you wanted you need to be able to reverse it. Luckily reversing production output and consumption is easy if you know how to do it (if the production...
My last post about adding a field to the item tracking lines turned out to be very technical, so this time I am doing a post that is completely without any programming or changes to the application. The topic is parallel routings in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, it is nothing new but something that I get a fair amount of questions about and someone once suggested that I should write a blog post about it. So, here it is! 🙂 Parallel routings (sometimes also referred to as parallel sequences) are used when multiple manufacturing operations/processes can or is need to be...
When implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in a manufacturing environment this question is always discussed; should the time posted against production orders be according to the expected values (e.g. the setup and run times in the routings, sometimes also referred to as nominal values) or should it be according to the actual time (entered by a user)? In my mind the answer to this should be driven by business requirements and should not be determined by the functionality available in a software (just like many other things when it comes to implementing an ERP system). My experience is that 3 out...
Using alternative production BOMs or routings is quite common in a manufacturing environment. It could for example be that larger orders are run in higher capacity machines, versions of products are produced with slight variations in components (like different colors), or you might produce the same item in two different locations and therefor need two different routings. These are just some examples, there are many more scenarios like that where you might need to change the production BOM or routing based on different factors. Microsoft Dynamics NAV allows you to manually change both the routing and production BOM used on...
A way to handle maintenance on machines in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is to create production orders with operations that represent the maintenance. The beauty of this is that you can then include the maintenance when scheduling the production orders, you also maintain history about when the maintenance was done and you have the option to capture the labor cost related to maintenance. Below is an example of how it can be done. (more…)
A topic that is discussed on all manufacturing implementations is Work Centers vs. Machine Centers. Questions like ‘should we be using machine centers?’ and ‘what are the differences?’ are always raised and discussed. It is very important to understand the differences and how to apply the functionality in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. I have seen several installations where the setup has been much more complicated than it needed to be and therefor the system became hard to work with. I have also seen cases where standard functionality that could have added lots of value was not utilized and even modifications being...
This is the third post in a series of subcontracting blog posts, and it starting to get a bit tricky. The topic is how to handle transport charges for subcontracting operations. In other words if you have a vendor that handles parts of the production process and you receive an invoice from a shipping agent/transportation company for the transportation of products either to and/or from the subcontractor. If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 it might be a good idea to read those first, this post assumes you know the basics of subcontracting and uses the same items...
This describes how to ship components to a subcontractor as part of a subcontracting process in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It is a frequently asked question, so I thought it deserved its own blog post. As the title indicates, this is a second post in a series of posts related to subcontracting. It might make sense to read part 1 first since this kind of built on top of it (using the same items, etc.). The key to shipping components to a subcontractor is to create a location that represent the vendor location and use transfer orders to ship the components....
This is the first part of a series of blog posts about the subcontracting functionality in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It describes how to setup and use the basic functionality, which is something that is very common to use for manufacturers (3 out of 4 places I go to uses some kind of subcontractors to perform operations that they can’t or don’t want to do in-house). Future posts on the subject subcontracting will describe things like how to ship the products to the subcontractor in a proper way, how shipping charges can be applied, how to receive subcontracted parts using warehouse...
To allocate the total costs posted against a production order towards multiple outputs is a bit tricky in standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you more or less have to manually separate the different costs and post them against each of the production order lines (this since the cost calculations in Dynamics NAV is per production order line). For material and capacity costs this involves dividing the quantities consumed and times spent between the production order lines and then post them individually against each of the lines. And for subcontracting costs it is more or less impossible (although nothing is impossible in...
